The ANC must normalise politics within itself

The African National Congress must, as a matter of urgency, normalise politics within itself.

We must resist the growing temptation to confuse technology with political organisation, administration with political judgment, and mechanical efficiency with political legitimacy. A political movement cannot outsource its political soul to a machine.

Technology cannot convene Branch General Meetings (BGMs) of a political formation. At most, technology can assist in administering, recording and facilitating a process whose legitimacy is fundamentally political.

The ANC must therefore stop reducing itself to a mere statistical or administrative organisation as if the life of a political movement can be reduced to databases, algorithms, verification codes, spreadsheets and automated procedures.

A machine can process information; it cannot produce political legitimacy.

Technology cannot resolve an appeal arising from a political process. An appeal is not merely a technical query requiring a technical response. It is a political question requiring political judgement, political interpretation and, ultimately, political accountability.

When a political organisation develops a kind of political allergy—when it becomes uncomfortable with political contestation, political debate and political judgement—it inevitably begins searching for substitutes. It starts imagining that politics can be neutralised by procedures, that disagreement can be eliminated through technology, and that difficult political questions can be handed over to machines.

That is a dangerous illusion.

You cannot automate politics out of a political movement.

Technology cannot select candidates for a people's organisation whose legitimacy is derived from the political will of its membership and whose existence is grounded in a particular ideological tradition.

Candidate selection is not merely the identification of names in a database. It is a political process through which a movement expresses its understanding of representation, leadership, accountability and the will of its people.

An algorithm may count votes.

It cannot understand the historical meaning of those votes.

A database may verify a membership number.

It cannot determine the political legitimacy of a struggle.

A system may flag an irregularity.

It cannot assume the political responsibility of resolving it.

Cdes, please—surely by now we must be alive to this reality.

The people of South Africa have entrusted their lives, their aspirations and their future to a political organisation—not to a machine. They did not vote for an algorithm. They did not entrust the transformation of their society to a database. They entrusted that responsibility to the African National Congress as a political movement.

Therefore, when something goes wrong in our organisational processes, the fundamental question cannot be, “What did the system say?”

The fundamental question must be:

What happened politically? Who is responsible? What does the Constitution of the movement require? What does the political judgement of the organisation demand? And, most importantly, what must now be done?

That is an internal question which the leadership must confront decisively from this moment onwards.

Every phase of a revolution has its setbacks.

Every movement that seeks to transform society will encounter contradictions, organisational weaknesses, political errors, internal conflicts and moments of retreat. The existence of setbacks does not, in itself, constitute the death of a movement.

The real test of a revolutionary organisation is not whether it encounters setbacks.

The real test is what it does after the setback.

Amakholwa ebezakuthi wona.

If this is where we find ourselves, then the question before us is not simply: How did we get here?

We must ask:

SITHINI KE NGOKO KWEZIZINTO?

What do we do now?

What is required now is not mourning.

Don't mourn. Reorganise.

Don't mourn.

Regroup.

Don't mourn.

Rebuild the political centre.

Don't mourn.

Reconstruct the organisational machinery of the movement.

Don't mourn.

Mobilise.

And above all, do not further paralyse the movement through an endless cycle of personal blame, accusations and recriminations.

We are here now.

History has placed us here.

The political responsibility is therefore to move from the question of who is to blame to the more consequential question of what must be done.

Blame may satisfy the emotions of the moment.

Organisation changes history.

The ANC cannot afford to spend its energies mourning its difficulties while the material conditions that produced those difficulties remain unresolved.

We must rebuild.

We must renew.

We must refocus.

We must reorganise.

We must recover the political confidence of the membership.

We must restore the culture of political education, ideological clarity, organisational discipline and collective responsibility.

And we must forge ahead.

Because revolution is not a bouquet of sweet roses.

Revolution is contradiction. Revolution is struggle. Revolution is uncertainty. Revolution is setbacks and recovery, advance and retreat, error and correction.

The history of the South African struggle itself teaches us that no serious movement can survive by pretending that its path will always be smooth.

What distinguishes a revolutionary movement is its capacity to learn from its defeats without becoming defeated by them.

This, therefore, is not the time for political paralysis.

It is time to return to the trenches—not trenches of military confrontation, but trenches of political education, organisational renewal, mass mobilisation and intellectual work.

Let us return to a thorough and systematic study of the South African revolution in particular, and of international working-class struggles in general.

Let us interrogate where we come from.

Let us understand where we are.

Let us honestly confront the contradictions that have brought us here.

And let us develop the political and organisational capacity necessary to take the movement forward.

The movement must once again become a school of politics.

A school of organisation.

A school of political thought.

A school of service to the people.

Technology must serve that mission—not replace it.

Machines must administer the process; cadres must provide the political judgement.

Systems may support the organisation; they cannot become the organisation.

Technology may assist the revolution; it cannot carry the political responsibility of the revolution.

That responsibility remains ours.

So, comrades, let us not mourn.

Let us reorganise.

Let us regroup.

Let us mobilise.

Let us rebuild.

Let us renew.

Let us study.

Let us organise.

And let us forge ahead.

The ANC must recover its politics.

The people must recover their movement.

And the movement must recover its capacity to make political decisions and take political responsibility.

Aluta continua.

By Fundile Gade

Writes in own personal capacity, Fundile Gade is ANC Eastern Cape PEC member, Social activist